I'm currently driving a Dodge Calliber rental car, and I noticed something I've noticed about other stock radios in domestic cars: I can reguarly get mid valley and Eugene stations in Beaverton. Also, AM sounds much better. With my aftermarket Panasonic radio in my personal car, AM sounds like a disaster, and I never DX any FM stations.

This is why I never replace the stock radios. After-market tuners always have terrible reception. Why is this?

In the late 80's I put a stereo with a Pioneer SuperTuner in my car. AWESOME FM reception! AM wasn't too bad either, if I recall.

I was told once that the stock radio is impediance matched with the speakers and antenna, but I have no idea if that is true.

Whats interesting is back in the mid to late 80's, you would buy a new car and the stock radio was absolute CRAP, so you would rip it out and put a nice one in. But for some reason, in the last 10-15 years the stock radios in most cars have gotten REALLY NICE, most have very impressive sound and I have to agree with Shane most stock car radios get better receptions than the big fancy expensive ones that you buy at the store.( I had no radio in my Yugo when I first bought it.) Infact I remember when I first bought the Yugo and I drove down to Eugene with No stereo all by myself. TALK ABOUT A BORING DRIVE!!!

I wish that I knew the answer to this question. I don't think that we will be able to get a definitive answer because most car stereos and virtually all other pieces of consumer electronics are designed overseas.

I think that a probable hypothesis is that the engineers who design aftermarket car stereos are under a lot of pressure to cut costs anywhere that they can. Very likely, the market research at the aftermarket car stereo manufacturers shows that most people select car stereos based on aesthetics and the presence of features such as MP3 playback, rather than performance. Factory-original car stereo designers, on the other hand, might get more leeway in what they can do because the cost of the car stere is a small percentage of the total cost of the car.

Why do stock car radios get superior reception?

Because the drivers headset is connected directly to his spotter.

Remember, never turn right when everyone else is turning left.

Zoom Zoom.

Alfredo, I think you are close to the mark.

The car manufacturers have a strong incentive to make great radios. It's a selling point more these days than it once was. Cars are beginning to work like other things are. Everybody knows how to make a good one, so the battle to differentiate has moved on to value adds, like styling and accessories and lots of configurations.

If a company were to just make a solid car, with no goodies, it would be very cheap. There are fewer dollars involved in that transaction, meaning the bigger gains are to be had by simply not selling simple cars!

Result is most all companies will then add value everywhere they can to compete. The radio is one of these things.

I really like this movement too. I'm unhappy with how AM radios are being made, for the most part, but the rest of it is just sweet!

That Hyundai I rented some time ago had the DSP powered radio. It was simply one of the best FM radios I have ever used. It had a nice audio input port, ability to read ISO filesystems for mp3 audio on CD, and had good receiver characteristics.

But for the poor AM performance, there is zero reason to get an after market device.

Who here likes the flashy after market radios anyway? Heck, some of them even have games on the things! (what is with that?)

That's kind of a downer for people looking to get good car stereo for older cars though. Pretty damn tough to get a clean looking, not busy receiver that performs well these days.

Maybe that will put some pressure on after market receiver manufacturers to design for more than just kids looking for dashboard flash and sizzle.

Maybe not...

When car radios incorporate HD, it's gonna really be a potent package. Looking forward to that someday, as I prefer the nicely integrated car radios to the current crop of after market stuff, HD or no.

The BOSE system in rig sounds awesome and gets great reception. I would never ever consider replacing it except with a Bose Nav Unit out of another similar vehicle. That thing is wired to the steering wheel controls, all of the warning chimes go through it, XM, and OnStar. I was told that I would loose tons of Bass by going aftermarket and would need about four add-on modules to keep everything working. The thing is plenty loud and has that great Bose bass sound which only goes full volume when Scorpions Humanity Hour 1 is playing. OH Yah, To go aftermarket the OEM harness would have to be chopped.....NO WAY!

That's another great point.

When auto manufacturers didn't care so much about acoutstics, cars didn't have good qualities. Often it's a bit of work to really get imaging in a car, for example.

Now, that focus on a more integrated design really helps. After market replacements are still great ideas. Speakers wear out --especially Darks!

Sometimes they have odd resonances --that's that boxy plastic sound you hear. Notch resonance --is a curse! Anyway, after market goodies can mitigate those things.

Sorry to derail a bit, but is it just me, or do you guys have some senstivity to that? I mean resonances that deliver that, "hey, I'm a great speaker in a crappy plastic housing" sound.

Been in plenty of cars that have pretty great radios, spoiled totally by just horrid acoustics where the speakers are.

Do some people not hear that, is it preferable to some? What?

Same thing can be said for headphones too. Good speaker elements, housed horribly. The specifications in terms of noise, distortion and frequency response do not account for this, meaning you can't actually judge the things without opening up the package and just listening to them.

Missing:
I don't know if this is what you are talking about, but I have heard many systems that seem to produce a 1-note "thump" instead of a full range of bass notes. The BA-receptor a good (bad) example of this, but some people seem to like it.

Yep. That's a low end artifact, very similar to what I'm describing.

Pretty easy to address really. All somebody has to do is some modeling of the acoustical environment. Small changes in shape --maybe the addition of some structures here and there too, will balance this out. Not doing that is where the notches of resonance come from in the first place.

The other approach is to sharply limit those kinds of resonances, favoring a much stronger speaker in general. Let it carry the note, instead of working with the housing to carry it.

Either is just fine. The sound ends up fairly well balanced with none of that boxy boom sound anywhere.

This is one of the things that Bose has done a lot of work on --with generally good results. It's also something we really can't address all that well at the receiver end. To do that, means modeling the environment so that the audio could be corrected.

If the modeling is done, why not just deal with it in the first place, leaving receiver complexity lower, and keeping receiver overall suitability for that environment higher?

Hey, there's a patent idea! Do the modeling such that there are notches in very annoying places (vocals, bass), then use a DSP to address that and deliver audio that works within that constraint. It's then a sort of lock in. Buy the best radio you can, and no matter what, it will sound less than the one that came with the car!

UGH... somebody will probably do it.

Chip technology has allowed more circuit functions to be consolidated in the small space available for the tuner section of automobile receivers. More circuit functions allows mobile tuners to equal the quality that previously was only available to home tuners/receivers. Advances in materials science also allows for more sophisticated filters. Remember when the IF of an FM tuner was a series of physical coils and caps that needed a circuit board of its own?

Yes I do.

And those had some AM characteristics lacking in nearly all new designs...

It's a win otherwise though.

I have gotten grief from people because the the radio that I put in my car is a late 1980s vintage Toyota radio without a cassette or CD player. But it is there for several reasons:

1) Sensitivity on both AM and FM is very good
2) Immunity to overload good on AM and excellent on FM
3) AM bandwidth is pushbutton selectable (I replaced the wide filter with a slightly wider one that produces the AMAX style audio response
4) AM Stereo is supported

Insofar as highly integrated receiver chips go, there are companies such as Microtune and Silicon Labs that now make all-in-one tuner ICs. Can the performance of these ICs match more traditional approaches? I don't know. Two things that are worth considering are that (1) because of cellular phones, WiFi, Bluetooth, and similar types of consumer product technologies, engineers have been doing a lot of work in recent years to build tiny receivers with synthesizers and other digital components and to overcome performance hurdles (mainly the digital circuitry causing interference to the signals being received) and (2) today, again because of pressures to miniaturize cellular phones and similar devices, the plastic parts that somebody looking at or designing a circuit board thinks of as ICs can actually be modules containing several chips, each optimized for its function (i.e. digital logic, low level RF, etc). I apologize if I got too carried away with the technical stuff here.

I'm thinking of adding a JL Audio Sub-Woofer and Amp in the back end and better insulating the doors with:
http://www.dynamat.com/products_car_audio_dynaliner.html
The people at Car Toys say this will be a noticeable improvement even without the Sub.

stock cars get better reception because they go slower then indy cars.

Its the same with car mfgrs designing ALL of their automotive systems to be more 'proprietary' relative to the Make , Model and Mfgr. etc. Its all about money of course. Money for the dealers and money for the mfgrs. If you design an automobile with every possible part and or piece of a system in such a way , the consumer is more or less forced to deal with the DEALER. Or it becomes more convenient to deal with the DEALER. And is also more expensive as we all know.

If you have an oil change, you can go to Wal Mart. If you need to have the spark plugs and wires changed ,you can go to a good but probably less expensive shop to get it done, or still even do it yourself if you can crawl through the maze of harnesses and even get to the plugs.

But if you break a mechanical heating control and cable assy, as I did on my last Mitsubishi, you find that its easier, but expensive to go to the DEALER to get it done. Same thing with radios, which are really entire 'Sound Systems" in most vehicles. And they are designed like much of the rest of the car to be rather proprietary. This cuts out much of the " Do it yourselfers" or the neighborhood Stereo Shop. Lurk mentioned above impedances relative to antenna and speaker arrays etc. That is exactly right ! You really have to know what you are doing nowdays to replace or change anything in a new vehicle with anything more than a cheap radio in it from the factory.

Well, as they say, your mileage may vary.
I have always had good luck with factory radios in all my GM cars dating way back the 60's. When my 65 Impala was on it's last journey to car heaven, I kept the radio from it. That sucker had excellent sensitivity and sound. I put it in my boat at the time. I still have that radio on the shelf in the garage. The radio in my Olds was great. The radio in my 76 Grand Prix was great. I then got a 1984 Pontiac Sunbird (J2000) with the factory radio with a five channel graphic equalizer. It had excellent sound and as one of my coworkers said, "it has a preponderance of bass, even on AM music stations". You don't hear sound like that on current radios. When I had to get rid of the Sunbird (200K miles), I got a Nissan Altima. Needless to say that radio sucked. It had good sensitivity but not so great sound. I wanted to keep the radio out of the Sunbird but it would not fit in the Altima.

We used to adjust a trimmer capacitor on all those older radios to match the antenna and it really worked on AM. Current radios don't have such an animal. You are stuck with impedance matching that is less than ideal.

The reason that factory radios seem to work better is because they are matched to the antenna line in the cars. Plus, most cars with built in antennas in windows have amplifiers in the line. Still not as good as an old fashioned whip antenna.

As I stated, I have always had good results with stock radios in GM cars....Delco radios. When I started buying imports (Datsun 1600 and later), I never had a stock radio that was worth much. The radio in my 2002 Altima is not bad but not as good as the old Delcos. I have replaced it with an HD tuner but it needs a subwoofer to get the good lows. Never needed that with the older radios. Got good bass out of the stock speakers. Granted, you couldn't hear or feel it 5 blocks away but so what. It worked great inside the car and that is all that was important. Unfortunately, for many youngsters, they seem to think that everyone within a mile of their car wants to hear and be impressed with their selections of 'thump-thump-thump'.

I used to do a lot of DXing in my earlier cars. Can't really do that anymore on AM. I think auto radio makers gave up on AM years ago. But, I got some good ones in the garage that I could hook up and use if I wanted to see how many stations I could get Coast to Coast on at the same time. DXing was great to listen to all the different sounds and DJ's from afar years ago. Now, who cares if you can get the same program all across the dial.

I don't think it's possible to make a good AM radio without inductors.

I'll tell you what ! This 2007 Mitsu I have now has got a great tuner/amp and sound system in it. Subwoofer in the back, tweeters in each front door upper strut, midranges in the dash in all 4 doors. Satellite radio, FM and AM. AM radio sounds OK, but pretty much like every other AM set up out there now. Of course the Sat. is real fine and the FM is good too. I have no complaints and it does MP3 real easy too with composite audio jacks avaliable in the center console.

Unless this vehicle had 150 K on it and was at least 10 years old , I wouldnt want to 'modify' this system much ! Do it yourself fixing at this point is covered on warranty and even if it wasnt I doubt whether I would dig into it too much for many miles down the road.

Back in the 'day' I had Delco radios that worked real well, with trimmer caps and what not, just like Jimbo's experience. Things were a lot simpler then and expectations much lower. Subwoofers werent a mainstay for my first car , a 1958 Chevy Biscayne.

The first 're-engineering' experience was with my 75 Olds Omega. I bought it new in Nov of 75'. It had an AM only radio in it. I negotiated an AM/FM receiver in the sale, which was still considered a real extra then and only came with the premium packages in the models like the Delta 88 or the Olds 98', not in the little Omegas. I was young then and just starting in radio, mostly as an engineer, so I knew something of the technical aspects involved.

What I ignored in my youthful universe at age 24 was that unless you specify the exact equipment and standards that you want, and get it in writing , you will get the bare minimum as installed. What I got was an Audiovox installed by some sound shop in NW portland, not the dealer and not a DELCO. The thing sounded terrible. It was MONO, which I did know ahead of time, but it still 'sucked" even for MONO, reception problems etc etc, noise and even intermodulation distortions. I couldnt believe it.

Well, I had that thing in that car till about 1978 and got totally fed up with it. I bought a Pioneer Super Tuner. Bought some rear deck 3 way speakers, a couple of 2 ways installed down by the front doors under-dash. It sounded 120 % better, It wasnt real hard to install, just paid attention to some detail and I was happy. The Supertuner set up worked top notch until i traded that thing in with 160 K miles on it in 1983.

Ah! the Pioneer "supertuner" with the round dial on the right and cassette (or 8 track in one version) on the left... very good aftermarket radio for the time. This was my first stereo FM car radio! Previous FMs that I had (factory) were mono only.

Edit: found one on eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/PIONEER-KP-500-SUPERTUNER_W0QQitemZ280209787285QQihZ018QQcat egoryZ71574QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

When were the trimmer caps eliminated? I have not seen one in years.

The trimmer caps went away when they started installing the antennas in the windshields. My 75 olds had an antenna windshield. Those were and still are real good for FM, not so hot for AM. The one in that Olds was very simple, a hair thin wire up the middle from the firewall and a right angle over the top of the glass like a dipole really. One each side. It worked well with my supertuner, but not so well with that Audiovox.

So early to mid 70s I think was when that all got started and the 'trimmers' were gone. Those things were good with the whip chassis mounted antennas.

I think the trimmer capacitors went away with the move to PLL-tuned radios. In the schematics of AM front ends that I've seen, the trimmer capacitor was in parallel with the input, and it formed a PI-network (trimmer/antenna/coax capacitance followed by a variable inductor, followed by a fixed capacitance across the first RF amplifier stage). These radios all used ganged variable inductors as the tuning mechanism.

My supertuner didnt look like that one. Not at all. It was smaller profile, had an analog slide rule backlit tuning bar and a cassette deck in the upper middle with 'auto reverse'. That was a bid deal then, auto-reverse.

I wonder what year this KP-500 above was?

It looks like the Pioneer Super Tuner didn't have any station memory pushbuttons. Is this correct?

No date on the owners manual/schematic, but I am thinking 1976-78 range. This radio had NO AM section, NO trimmer cap, just a local/distance switch, then straight (through a 22pf cap) to the first tuned circuit.

Alfredo:
Correct... It was very simple, but effective.

update: just found a number on the manual "<76G05E05K>" so perhaps, this indicates 1976?

Ok , I got the later model. I got mine in mid to later in 78'( summertime I think it was )...I think they changed them around by then. We have a few of these ( like mine was ) in intercom system consoles in our schools here. And they still work ! As long as we can keep an antenna on them, which is hard because of all the moving about of random paperwork and junk in the school offices. they keep dislodging the antenna cables and of course no one really listens to a radio anymore in a school !

Rauland used them for radio tuners by 1980 to 85 in their director model intercom systems. These tuners had an AM band in them as well.

The one I had didnt have push buttons of any kind. It was strictly analog linear slide rule tuning. Had a stereo light for locking on a signal on just FM of course. Had a chrome switch to reverse and forward the cassette. Autoreverse feature. Balance controls , Treble, Bass and all that jazz. Seems to me there were some internal trimmers on the chassis that acted like an equalizer of sorts. These adjustments were so that you could set up your system and tailor it to whatever speaker enclosure/array 2 or 3 way systems.

I cant remember if the one I had was a 4 channel or just a 2 channel with a 4 to 8 ohm impedance for multiple speaker left and right front and back speakers. I keep thinking that mine was a 4 channel so that you could fade the rear or front and balance everything up just right.

It seems to me that I paid $90 for this tuner in 1978. The 3 way rear deck speakers were 35 or 40 bucks apiece. And the front 2 ways were like 20 or 25 bucks a pop. 200 bucks was a lot of money to spend on such stuff for your car back in the day, at least in my universe it was.

I had the 8 track version of that Pioneer supertuner radio in a '74 Ford Courier p/u...still the best car FM tuner I've ever owned! That thing rocked on FM! I liked the circular dial with the super-smooth tuning.

I had a Supertuner that was mislabeled as $60. It should have been about a hundred dollars more! It replaced my AM in-dash radio, while I kept the underdash Craig Poweplay FM/Cassette player that actually had 5 pushbuttons for FM in 1975! I was so excited! It even had a bracket to remove it as part of the unit. The Pioneer was quite a step up from the Craig as far as driving around town was concerned. The Craig was subject to all kinds of overload but once you got out of town, all sorts of things would pop in and stereo reception of Portland stations was rock solid right up the Eugene towers!

Cool! the mid 60s Delco AM-FM radios had 5 pushbuttons, BUT they tuned to the same dial position in either band... if you were lucky some of the positions would line up close enough on both AM and FM.

I had a Supertuner II in the car I had back in the 80's and from Seaside, on a clear day in a parking lot near the beach in January I was able to receive stations from Vancouver, BC, San Francisco, Montana and Calgary in the early afternoon.
I asked the same question to a stereo installer in later years and he told me that it was simply that most stereo manufactures put the quality into the CD player part of the stereo and go cheap on the radio.
Has anyone noticed the shorter antennas on the new cars? I just bought a 2008 Honda CRV and drove it to Salem today. The reception was pretty good on both bands.

It just occurred to me that digital presets have been around so long that some people may not appreciate the "joy" of real pushbuttons. It wasn't just a matter of finding a station and presetting it. You had to find the station, pull a button all the way out and then, push it all the way back in. Usually, if you did it that way, the station would move up or down the dial so you had to adjust it slightly off frequency and try again(and again)until you got it just right. Somethimes, it would move off frequency when you hit the button again and you would have to start all over. To add to the fun, on some radios, you could only program stations that were close in dial position to the pushbutton you wanted to use. Let's say you wanted 620 for the first button and 1190 for the second: 620 would be fine but the dial wouldn't go up to 1190 without pushing one of the other buttons. It would have to be the third or fourth button.

Although I think the main question has been answered, this is turning into a fun thread. One "odd" thing that I noticed years ago was that some stores with functional displays of car radios didn't bother to connect antennas to the radios! This was in the days before manufacturers started to "beautify" their radios.

Hey Shane, would that rental car have picked up KFGR from more than a block away?? (wink, wink)

Always wanted to buy the original KFGR but the building and tower are now gone, sadly.

BETTER NOISE FILTERING?MORE TREBLE ON AM???
better testing/designe valuation at factory??
are stock units less pron to being overloaded by strong local stations????

My experience has been, with exceptions, that it depends on the value of the car: cheap car, cheap radio.

Remember, when folks buy a new car and the radio sucks, they return the whole car! Ever note what automobile manufacturers charge for car stereos?

If you pay that much for an aftermarket stereo, you get a really nice one. No guarantees on the AM section, though, unfortunately.

So, 10-15 years ago when they cheaped out on the stock radio, people started replacing them. Losing money, the manufacturers starting putting in better radios.

I agree with Kent. I upgraded my sound system in my '98 to "Premium" and the performance is excellent. The head is made by Alpine and the amp/spkrs are Harmon K. The AM tuner works just fine. I think some of you guys are just expecting too much from a band that inherently has lots of limitations. I originally thought the in windshield diversity antenna would be a weak link, but it isn't. The only thing missing 10 years down the road is a direct input for my iPod, but the 6 CD changer in the trunk provides enough variety on all but the longest journeys. Oh, and there's no subwoofer to propel the car down the street without using gas, probably a must for the younger guys.

I've noted a clear difference between older school AM tuner sections and new school ones.

In many cases it comes down to space hungry inductors and the kinds of circuits that go along with that. I know that sounds goofy, but really it seems to be a differentiator that is solid. When I've had the chance to crack the case on radios, the inductors are in the good ones and are not in the poor ones.

Newer tuners tend to perform nicely in the solid coverage zone. IMHO, they are a bit more prone to noise interfearence than older ones are, but that could easily just be me, or an artifact of the antenna design.

Once outside that coverage zone, the difference between older tuners and newer ones is pretty clear. There is lots of wierd flanging, a sound that resembles a sideband radio not well aligned with the signal. Distortion, in general is a lot higher too.

On many newer tuners, I find the distortion high enough to be on my radar --as in it impacts the program quality and listening "get tired time" significantly. At lower signal levels, it's often downright bad.

There are limits on AM. It's an additive modulation technique, so things are gonna happen. That's all part of the experience overall, and good or bad, it's just there.

How well that combination of signals is reproduced is a different matter completely, and not a strong point for most all newer AM radios I've listened to.

(rent a lot of cars, and a whole lot of them appear to use the same crappy AM design...)

Some radios have moved to incorporating a DSP on the FM analog side of things. This is simply an excellent move. The Hyundai Sonata I had for a week, produced the best FM analog sound ever, and it did it across a very wide range of operating conditions. Totally sweet.

The AM, didn't use the DSP, and had all the bad artifacts I mentioned above Major bummer. Clearly, even with the lower quality circuits, software signal processing with the DSP has the potential to really differentiate the radio and deliver something far closer to what the band is capable of.

Generally speaking, most new AM tuners do not even come close to what is actually possible to reproduce from the original broadcast.

And I'm not talking bandwidth or stereo or anything like that. Just solid reproduction of the core audio components. They are not there.

The non-tuned front end (no coils) AM tuners upconvert the AM broadcast signals to a 10.7 MHz 1st IF and optionally downconvert that to a 450 kHz second IF. For this approach to work well, the first mixer has to have a very wide dynamic range because it sees the entire broadcast band. Unfortunately, the really good mixers that could do this job well have other aspects (size & cost) that make them unattractive for use in a consumer product.

...I thought that I had to run to a meeting, so I cut my last post short. What I'd like to add is that manufacturers want to get rid of as many things that have to be adjusted, such as front end coils, in order to cut costs. I don't necessarily fault them for this.

I work with some professional RF designers who are also amateur radio enthusiasts who design and build their own equipment. Some of these guys will spare no expense to build a good front end. Their mixers of choice are passive "diode ring" mixers. Unfortunately, this circuit needs transformers, and the local oscillator has to be very strong (in some cases on the order of several milliwatts). FETs can also be used to build a passive switching mixer, but you would probably need a BiCMOS process in order to put this circuit into an IC.

As far as what should be considered appropriate performance expectations for AM tuners, are the AMAX standards from the early 1990s too high an expectation?

Well, I don't know what realistic expectations are. I do know the current crop of AM radios isn't there.

Liked the early Delco digital AM radios. Some of those did AM Stereo. If that's factored out, the performance is pretty damn good otherwise.

Of course, the analogs are better, but that's not realistic these days. No biggie. When one reaches that level of performance, it's not a big deal to the average joe.

I hadn't thought about adjustment. I don't blame them for that either.

Maybe software can help...

Silicon Labs developed an AM/FM tuner chip where the AM front end self-adjusts, so yes, it is doable. My guess is that this chip has an algorithm that sweeps the front end tuning until it finds where the signal strength is at a maximum. Unfortunately, Silicon Labs is one of those companies that likes to keep a very tight control over what information they give out about their products. You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get a datasheet. Bastards!

"Liked the early Delco digital AM radios. Some of those did AM Stereo."

I have one of those somewhere.......

I have a mid-1990s vintage Delco radio/cassette unit from a Cadillac that I bought a few years ago. Those are good radios. However, I haven't used mine very much because I don't own any vehicles which have the large (double-DIN?) sized opening that those radios need. I think that at the time I bought the radio anticipating that I might be buying a low-mileage used pickup truck where the radio might fit.

8 track tapeplayers were popular feature,then cassettes!!got msny people to upgrade from AM only stock radiosbefore zfM became more popular.most AM only stock radios had 5 push buttons(mechanical memory!!!plus a tone control for more bass or less bass/moretreble.

Alfredo,
I agree, the GM/Delco radios from that era do have good resception, especially on AM.

Delco appears to have had much of the market at one time... a 1966 Delco service manual shows listings for Plymouth, Dodge, Chrysler, Lincoln and Studebaker, as well as the all the usual GM autos.

I remember that in the 1980s, Mopar was making the radios and other electrical/electronic components of Dodge and Chrysler vehicles. I had never thought that Mopar and Delco were independent entities from the respective automakers that they made products for--unitl now.

The 1966 Delco manual that I have shows 3 versions of AM/FM "wonder bar" tuning radio... Oldsmobile Toronado, Chrysler Imperial and Lincoln. These all use the same circuit board, but differ slightly in external appearance, dial and switching functions (the Lincoln radio, for example has power antenna up/down buttons). The funny thing here is that that the Lincoln radio is pictured with a BIG "FoMoCo" logo on the chassis! I don't know if Delco ever produced radios with a "Mopar" logo, however.

FoMoCo is Ford Motor Company. Lincolns were made by Ford.

Jimbo:
Exactly! BUT the radio was made by Delco, a GM company.

Odd that Ford turned to GM for radios for their luxury cars